The promise of independent work meets the reality of paying to sit in a shared office, and the contradiction defines a generation of London workers
I write about work and culture in Shoreditch for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, and I do it, like so many of my generation, as a freelancer, which means I am living the dream of independent work, a dream that, in practice, involves paying a monthly fee to sit in a shared office surrounded by strangers also living the dream.
The freelance dream was supposed to be freedom, the escape from the office, the boss, the commute, the nine-to-five, the chance to work on one own terms, when and where and how one chose. The co-working reality is that we have all, having escaped the office, immediately paid to recreate the office, the same desks, the same fluorescent-ish lighting, the same low hum of other people pretending to work, the freedom of independence exercised, mostly, by sitting in a room full of other independent people doing the same.
The Office We Pay To Sit In
The co-working space is the front room of the gig economy, and it is a curious institution. We pay, individually, for the privilege of the shared desk, the unlimited coffee, the table tennis no one plays, the networking events no one wants, the whole apparatus of the modern flexible workplace, which turns out to be remarkably like the old inflexible workplace except that we pay for it ourselves and no one is obliged to give us a pension. I have written about this contradiction in my column, from a desk in exactly such a space.
The freedom is real, to be clear. I do choose my hours, my projects, my clients, and that freedom is genuine and valuable. But it comes bundled with a precarity that the dream did not advertise, the irregular income, the absent benefits, the constant hustle for the next gig, the freedom and the insecurity inseparable, two sides of the same independent coin. The co-working space, where we gather in our shared precarity, is the physical embodiment of this bargain, the front room of an economy that offers freedom and insecurity in equal, inseparable measure.
The Community Of The Precarious
What the co-working space does offer, genuinely, is company, the antidote to the isolation that freelance work can bring, the community of the precarious, the strangers who become, if not friends, at least familiar faces, fellow travellers in the gig economy gathered in the shared front room. The serious analysis of the changing nature of work, which I follow, recognises this isolation as a real cost of the freelance model, and the co-working space as a real, if commercialised, response to it.
And so we gather, the freelancers and the founders and the remote workers, paying to sit together in the front room of the gig economy, exercising our hard-won freedom by recreating the office we fled, finding in the shared space a community of the precarious that softens, a little, the isolation of independent work. It is a contradiction, the office we pay to sit in, the freedom that recreates its own constraint, and it is, for better and worse, the defining workplace of my generation.
So I will keep working from the co-working space, keep paying to sit among strangers also living the dream, keep documenting the contradiction from within it, the freelance freedom and the co-working reality, the independence and the precarity, the office we fled and the office we pay to recreate. It is absurd, and it is real, and it is, increasingly, simply how a generation of London works, in the front room of the gig economy, free and insecure and not, at least, alone.
The rise of freelance and gig work has transformed the experience of work for a large and growing share of the London workforce, the traditional employment relationship giving way to a patchwork of contracts and clients and projects, the stability of the salaried job replaced by the flexibility and the precarity of independent work, a transformation that the co-working space both serves and symbolises.
The freedom the model offers is genuine and valued, the autonomy over one time and work, the escape from the constraints of conventional employment, the ability to shape one working life around one own priorities, a freedom that many freelancers, for all their complaints, would not readily surrender, the independence a real good however bundled with insecurity.
The precarity, equally genuine, is the price of the freedom, the irregular income, the absent benefits, the lack of the protections that conventional employment provides, the constant insecurity of the next gig, the vulnerability to illness and downturn and the simple drying-up of work, the freedom and the insecurity inseparable, the independent worker bearing the risks that the employer once bore.
The co-working space commercialises the response to the isolation of independent work, charging for the company that the office once provided for free, monetising the human need for colleagues and community, the front room of the gig economy a business built on the loneliness the gig economy creates, the solution to the isolation itself a product to be purchased.
The community it provides, however commercialised, is real, the familiar faces, the shared experience, the network of fellow freelancers, the softening of the isolation that independent work brings, a genuine human value delivered through a commercial form, the company of the precarious a real good even when one must pay for it, the shared front room a real community even when it is also a business.
More in this vein at The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
